


Palinode

by betweenheroesandvillains



Series: The Palinode of Armitage Hux [3]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Character Death, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Emotional Manipulation, Extremely Graphic Suicide Attempt, Hurt/Comfort, Imprisonment, Other, Torture, aftermath of war, implied abuse of dead bodies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-01-12 09:43:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18443981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betweenheroesandvillains/pseuds/betweenheroesandvillains
Summary: "I revoke,” he whispered, his breathing erratic and coming in short bursts. Rey felt helpless, her hands hovering inches from his bruised body as he fixed her with a stare that was half sharp, half incredibly far away. “I revoke being Armitage Hux."





	Palinode

**Author's Note:**

> So I lost.  
> I lost it all with my eyes  
> wide open.  
> \- Ocean Vuong, Threshold (Night Sky with Exit Wounds)
> 
> Please heed the tags on this one.

This was what death had to be like. The blackness that weighed heavily on his eyes and chest and in which he seemed to drown. The deafening silence that only left space for the humming of his own thoughts, made them run in circles. The cold that was not quite _cold_ , not cutting like the rains on Arkanis had been, or the Starkiller storms, but persistently seeped into his bones until he did not remember a time when they didn't ache.

But he had a beating heart. He could breathe, feel pain. He could, if he wanted to, stand up from his curled-up position in the corner and walk the length and breadth of his cell.  
He knew he was alive by this.  
Or at least, he was relatively sure of it.

–

His fall had been a deep one.

There was no use denying it, he had lost more than most could ever hope to, had had it all and now had none. Had made his steep way up, Lieutenant to General to Emperor, had had it all until a coup had removed him from his throne.  
But that didn't bear thinking. The fact that he had allowed himself to love and trust Kylo Ren, and that this trust had been betrayed, tasted too bitter. He could not dwell on it.

Some days he could still feel the crown on his head, a phantom pressure on his temples that more often than not turned into a migraine. And when he blinked fast enough at the peak of the pain, he could sometimes still see the throne room as if it was real, as if all he had to do was to reach out and he would be able to touch the pillars.

Nothing but illusions.  
That was what his life had turned into, one lie he told himself after the other.  
He was a good liar, though.

Sometimes he even believed his own untruths.

–

There were short moments of light, like punches to his face. Reminders that the world kept turning without him.  
He flinched from them like an animal would flinch from a flame. Because it laid him bare. Because it left every bruised inch of his body out in the open.  
Most of all, because it meant pain.

He had thought he knew torture, before. But nothing could have prepared him for what he had to endure at the hands of Kylo Ren. Nothing could have eased his way into the broken fingers, the dislocated joints and cuts and burns.

There was method to it. An increase in duration and intensity. The damage was not permanent yet but he was sure that, too, would change eventually. Emotional manipulation that he recognized but could not fight. Long stretches of time in which nothing happened, allowing him to recover and have hope. Crushing that hope again.

What it lacked was a rhyme or reason.  
Ren, _he had taken to calling him Ren again, how pathetic_ , never asked him a single question. He didn't want Hux to tell him anything, to do anything. Only talked to mock him more and twist the metaphorical knife in Hux's side.  
Ren took perverse pleasure in his cruelty, and his eyes flashed with every scream he got out of Hux.

–

_The darkness inside her was all-consuming and all-encompassing. She could just as well have been blind, it would not have made a difference. Every colour and every spark of light had left her life, and she still was not sure whether she had done it herself or whether it was the loss.  
She wanted to vanish. Not to die, that connoted a violence she did not have the energy to feel any longer. Just to disappear, unbecome. Un-be._

_She didn't put up a fight when they came for her, being too weak and still caught up in fresh grief. The ends of the severed Force bonds danced inside her, the last convulsions of a dead thing. There was nothing but silence in her mind, and blackness beneath that. She closed her eyes. Then she closed her eyes again. There was nothing in the universe worth seeing, if Finn and Poe were gone._

–

Loneliness attained a new meaning in the blackness of his cell. Loneliness tasted of bile and bitterness. Loneliness was the feeling of re-setting his own fingers, a pain so searing and yet so horribly familiar at this point. Loneliness was licking his wounds, literally, in the corner furthest from the door.  
There was little to keep the feeling at bay. The cell, he knew, was empty except for the rags that he pathetically called a bed. While waiting for the cuts on his shoulders to heal, he made up plans for his grand escape. Sometimes, killing Ren was involved in these plans. Those, Hux filed away, unsure if he wanted to forget them or go through with them.

The problem, Hux thought when the stretches between the pain grew too long, was that he knew the rules. Surviving the torture was only half of the deal. The other half was keeping his mind intact. Keeping himself occupied, not give into the decay and despair. He'd done this dozens of times, when he was younger. They'd hidden a fake cyanide capsule in the trainees' teeth and told them to bite down when they felt like breaking. Then they had stopped the time. The average trainee faltered after five to seven days. Hux had known those statistics and had held onto them with both hands and a viciously precise internal clock. In his most successful run, he had bitten the capsule on day eleven.  
In this cell, he had lost track of time after day fifteen.  
His sanity was tied to the thinnest thread of hope, the last string he had not quite managed to snap.

Sometimes, when his migraines split his brain into a hundred pieces of pain, he wondered what insanity would feel like. If it might be easier.

–

_She should have felt scared. She should have been angry. She should have felt anything at all. She should have fought against the fact that she had no privacy at all. She didn't. All feelings were dull, behind a veil. Everything was out of focus, lifeless. She heard voices and commands, but the words never registered. There was just the afterglow of life imprinted on the insides of her eyelids. She didn't want to see it. But she didn't get a choice. She sat and stared into nothing. Sometimes, the Force would reach out towards her. Rey would count the scars on her fingers, the lines on the back of her hand, then those in her palms, until the pressure was gone._

_Time passed strangely in this place. She could have kept track of it – the stormtroopers sitting in a room with her came and went at regular intervals. But Rey didn't care. Time mattered only for the living, and nobody who mattered was alive any more. It felt like time didn't pass at all, and then a chunk would break off. Someone would shove food in her hands, or make her drink. Very faintly, something was burning under her skin. She was not good at naming it, but if she had to give it a name, it would be expectation._

_Something changed. The hollowness of waiting was replaced by a flurry of motions. Two stormtroopers became four, became six and a guard clad in black. They were prepared for her putting up a fight. Rey was long past fighting._

_She counted her steps as she was lead down a corridor. She counted the seconds it took the cell door to slide open. She counted the fractures of the moment between the door opening and being shoved into a room. She counted, because numbers were true, and because they were better than the silence of death that still festered within her. She was about to start counting her own heartbeats when a voice cracked through the silence.  
“You,” he said and Rey lost count. The world stopped around her. She stood absolutely still in the middle of it. Because it couldn't be. It _couldn't _be.___

_____She saw him._  
Not truly, not in the perpetual darkness of the cell. But even through her closed eyes he shone, a flickering spark of reality, sharper than life.  
He was supposed to be dead.  
He wasn't. 

___Carefully, slowly, Rey re-arranged the universe around his voice._ _ _

__–_ _

_Rey_. Hux remembered her name, had it on his tongue, held it against his teeth. Rey. The Jedi girl. The enemy.  
Now, she was sitting opposite him on the other side of the cell. He took her in as far as he could. Her face was pale, gaunt. Her hair was falling in her face, dark against her skin. She looked feral and hollow, and she was radiating hatred. Hux wondered if she would kill him. Then he wondered if it mattered. 

__"You killed him!” Her words were sharp and loud after days of mutually hostile silence. Hux looked up from where he had studied the latest burns on his arm. He did not mean to sound detached, but he lacked the strength to muster any emotion. “Who?”  
Hatred seeped into her every word. “Poe Dameron. You shot him out of the sky!” Hux tilted his head. Dameron he remembered, stocky and sharp. A good man, despite being on the other side. An extraordinary pilot. Hux didn't remember giving an order that might have killed him.  
Hux didn't remember a lot of things.  
“I'm sorry.” It was not enough. But it was all he had to offer. He pushed the words towards her and turned away from her anger. 

__–_ _

__He was nothing but an accumulation of pains. One seeped into the other until he couldn't even tell where they started. He was lying in a cradle of aches, and there was nothing he could do to about it. He couldn't even breathe properly, his nose a mess, his mouth full of teeth that felt loose enough to fall out if he opened it. Panic rose in his chest, thrumming through his blood. He couldn't breathe, and he would die like this, and the darkness felt like a physical pressure, and he couldn't _breathe_...  
“Don't move.”  
Her voice cut through Hux's thoughts, tinged with anger. Rey moved quickly, quietly. He could feel the hate she had towards him radiate off her as she looked him over. He closed his eyes against her glare. “Don't move,” she said again.  
Then she set her hands on his nose and shifted the bone with a sickening crack.  
It was worse than the breaking itself. The sound, the explosion of pain and colours behind his eyes, the blood welling over his lips. He thrashed about but Rey had shifted out of his reach, taking her hate with her. The pain in his nose subsided, leaving not the feeling of a bone out of place but rather the persistent throbbing of something bound to heal.  
Rey had set his nose.  
Hux tried to wrap his head around it. Rey hated him. He knew that to be true. Rey had set his nose. He also knew the truth of that. Somehow, he couldn't bring the two together. Two negative poles of a magnet; it simply couldn't exist.  
He ought to thank her, some part of him offered. But he couldn't go through with it. Instead, he fell back into his pain and swallowed the blood in his mouth. 

__–_ _

__When he was gone, she was floating.  
When he was there, she had something to concentrate on.  
The source of her caring, she told herself, was simple survival. If he died, she'd be left with nothing again. So it became a pattern. 

__Hux would be pulled away, leaving Rey to her counting, to her just willing the time to go by faster. Then, after what felt like eternity, he would be brought back. Bloodied and bruised, joints dislocated and bones broken. He'd crawl over to his corner, an animal that didn't know why it was being kicked. She would follow him, sit with him. There was not much she could do about the cuts, the burns. But she could reduce a dislocation. She could set bones.  
So she did.  
She did what she could to keep him close, even when he looked at her with confused eyes. Sometimes, words would tumble out of her mouth. Even rarer, that he would answer. 

__

_She had strange dreams. Dreams in which she walked places that she remembered vaguely. Some planet. A base, full of people she couldn't touch, who were like smoke to her._

__

Slowly, a conversation started between them. Short at first, exchanges of five, six words. “Better,” she asked, and he said, “Yes,” and, “Thank you.”  
It quickly turned more complex than that. “Who did that to you,” she wanted to know. Not out of curiosity, more because she truly didn't understand. Hux swallowed, lips pressed together. Then he turned his head away. “Kylo Ren,” he said. Pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum. Rey nodded.

Can't you feel him,” he asked another time while she was rotating his shoulder back in place. He was still bleeding, probably even all over her, but she didn't care. Rey waited until the joint popped back before she shook her head. She tried to think of words to explain the emptiness she was feeling, silence that was still better than the residue image and memories of everything she had ever loved. Words for the feeling of having closed her eyes. “I cut that off,” which felt awfully insufficient. She couldn't come up with anything else.

__

_She walked a starship she had never seen but her feet knew the way. So many lights, so many lives buzzing around her. It ached, a familiar pain that was Finn and Poe and Luke. Everything she had lost. A pain she had left with the Force. She kept walking. Walking until a door opened in front of her, and a woman with tightly braided hair turned around. Her eyes were wide when she saw Rey. Her hand flew up, half reaching out. “It worked,” she whispered as she stepped closer towards Rey. “I called you and you answered. You're alive!” Leia's smile was almost worth the void inside her chest where her Force bonds used to be._

__

"What happened to you,” she asked while wiping blood from his cheekbone. His eye was swollen shut. She had bound three of his fingers together with a strip of cloth from her tunic to help them heal straight. They were huddled together because Hux had been shivering when they had brought him back. “Him,” Hux spat out. And then, after a long break: “He betrayed me. He took everything. And now...” His hand, bent at a strange angle due to broken metacarpals, came up. Trying to encompass the situation. They dropped the topic. 

He got worse. She watched the progression, unable to help. The bruises became bigger, wandered from his face to his neck. Deep cuts littered his shoulders and chest, some deep enough to gape, others infected. Rey felt like he was slowly letting go. As if someone was prying his fingers off life. She watched him curled up and shivering, half asleep and half delirious, trying to keep pressure off his broken ribs. 

Slowly, she crept closer. He was shivering, his breathing shallow.  
Rey curled up next to him, winding her arms around him to warm him up. Latching onto him. Holding onto him. She was tired of floating. 

__

_“There will be an attack, Rey. It's your chance.” Leia looked exhausted, somewhat sad. She did her best to keep her emotions at bay. “I don't know if we can find you. You'll have to free yourself.” Rey thought of Hux and Leia corrected herself. “Yourselves. You will need to find us.” Leia put a hand over her face. “I am sorry we can't do more.” Rey wanted to reach out, but just looking at her hurt too much already. “I understand.” There was more to be said, but her mouth felt as if it was full of blood, and her heart was empty. She pulled herself back into her mind. Leia let her go._

__–_ _

The door opened while Rey was trying to get him to drink.  
It made Hux's heart rattle a bit, shaking against her in panic. _Too early_ , he thought, though he couldn't be sure. His mind had been to focussed on the pain, the exhaustion, on Rey's counting of his scars under her breath. 

He was pulled up quickly, vision swimming for some moments as he was pulled into the room that was so achingly familiar. Even the dread was muted after all these months.  
But something was different this time. The air smelled sharper, as if electrically charged. As if someone had vaporised acid. He was put on the same tilted stainless steel table he knew so well. Stared at the same spot on the wall he knew so well. Pulled himself together as far as he could, pulled the walls up.

Ren was more cruel than ever. He did not bother with teasing. The first thing he did was to pry open half-healed cuts, exposing subcutaneous fat, rubbing something into the wounds that felt like fire. But that, Hux knew as he attempted to think through the ringing in his ears, was just the beginning. The prelude. He zoned out, falling back into himself. He did not want to think about what was to come.

Are you not tired of it yet?” Ren's voice was deceptively soft as he set his hand on Hux's chest. The taunting version of a lover's caress. Hux shivered, tears having formed in the corners of his eyes and now running down his face. “Do you maybe even enjoy it?”  
The electric shock went through him unexpectedly, from Ren's hand through Hux's body. His muscles tensed up, eyes rolling back as the shift in tension pulled on his broken bones. The next moment, Ren took his wrist and bent it backwards. Joints popped, the elbow at an unnatural angle, the shoulder almost dislocating again, lesions tearing open again and muscles pulled so tight they felt like ripping apart.

"I revoke it,” he cried when Ren bent his wrist further and further backwards, watching him writhe like an insect.  
The movement stopped, his bone half an inch from fracturing, and Hux could feel Ren's curious gaze on his face. “You... revoke?” The pressure on his wrist disappeared, only to be replaced by pressure on his broken ribs. Ren's voice was a purr, a soft breath against Hux's face. “What is there left to revoke, Armitage Hux?” He pressed a finger against a fractured rib and smiled, and Hux wasn't sure which of both hurt worse. “You are nothing. You have nothing left. Everything you built has been destroyed. And it was easy,” he said, putting more pressure on the bone and snapping it a second time. Hux wasn't sure if he cried out, his ears ringing and mind white with pain. “What's the worth of an Empire if it's so easily destroyed?” He didn't mean to, but Hux looked into Ren's eyes and saw the golden flash that preceded agony. “What's the worth of a man who lets himself be destroyed pain?” Ren went down his ribs and snapped three in quick succession. Some part inside him, drilled into him by decades of knowing torture intimately, made a note that the number of broken ribs was approaching dangerous. It didn't stay in his mind for very long. When Ren set his hands firmly on Hux's chest, it curled into itself and waited, together with everything else about him. “Tell me, Armitage Hux,” Ren whispered as he increased the pressure on the chestbone. “What is your worth after all?” He felt the caving of his chest like the grinding of two colliding star destroyers. “What was it all for?” Ren's fingertips bright spots of agony, leaving no space for his words to register. “You are nothing,” Ren hissed, and Hux cracked.

__–_ _

__It was the waiting that drove her crazy. The waiting for the door to open and bring Hux back. The waiting for Leia to reach out. Rey didn't dare to open up again and connect to her through the Force. Every part of her felt raw and tender, like she had been flayed. Even just the idea of using the Force sent pain through her very being.  
Rey paced the cell, in long steps and short ones, quickly and slowly, in length and width. She walked until her feet ached. She walked until the clicking in her knees became sharp pangs of pain. She walked until she was about to forget her own name, until there was nothing left but the mechanics of the movement.  
Her head shot up when the door opened. 

Hux was bloody, and bent in ways that made Rey's stomach lurch. It didn't make sense. It was impossible, she thought as Hux was deposited on the floor of the cell, for anyone to look like this and be alive. Even before the door was shut again, she was on her knees, trying to see if he was still breathing, if she could do anything.  
Hux's face was bruised, his hair matted with drying blood. His lips were forming words, and Rey leaned closer to understand what he was trying to say, fear pulsing through her veins. 

"I revoke,” he whispered, his breathing erratic and coming in short bursts. Rey felt helpless, her hands hovering inches from his bruised body as he fixed her with a stare that was half sharp, half incredibly far away. “I revoke being Armitage Hux."  
He needed absolution, she understood.  
She also understood that she was in no position to give it.  
Her wordlessness hung heavy between them before Hux's eyes slid shut and he shifted his body , searching for a bearable position. Rey waited, her fingers shaking as she kept herself from touching him.  
Everything was frozen between them, hung in balance. Rey watched him, watched her own hand so close to his frame, watched the tilt of the universe at his admission, and counted. She counted every staggering, breaking breath of the man she was supposed to hate but couldn't, simply couldn't. She counted the seconds that kept him away from death, the irregular beats of his heart that seemed to reverberate with the empty cell. She counted until the numbers didn't make sense any longer, until his absolute exhaustion had overwritten the pain and sent him into something resembling sleep. She counted until there was nothing in the world but his numbers and her bone deep, ice cold understanding that she would never be able to absolve him from everything he had done, but that she had the power to do one thing.  
Carefully, she set herself right next to him, one finger touching his left palm, the only part of his body that didn't seem mangled.  
“I absolve you,” she whispered into the still air, filling the meaning behind the words into every thread of existence between them. Hux's hand twitched under her finger, as if some part of him tried to acknowledge her words. “I absolve you from being Armitage Hux.”  
The universe shifted again. Hux's breath hitched.  
Rey settled against the wall and counted the seconds between his breaths. 

__–_ _

Don't be obtuse.”  
He said the word, but it didn't carry any sharpness. “We need a reason for them to open the doors in the middle of an attack.” His breathing was strained and rattled in his broken chest. “One of us must die.”  
“We are already dead,” she retorted, not sure where the words came from. It didn't matter. Even with his ribs caved in he laughed, his tone gravelly as he said, “Not dead enough.” A stream of blood trickled down the side of his chin and Rey couldn't take her eyes off it. 

The plan took days to develop. Partially because it relied on luck more than either of them liked, partially because they kept arguing about the specifics.  
“You're too weak. You won't make it.” Hux laughed in the low, husky way that caused the least pain. “It's not a question of _making it_ though.” Rey's fingers curled into her palms, biting the skin. She would have been angry, but she couldn't burden Hux with her anger. He was constantly bordering on delirious.  
“You can't even use your hands. How are you going to do it?” She spat it out, not waiting for an answer. “I could cut deep enough to make it seem real, they'd get me out and then...”  
“ _Seeming_ real is not enough!” Hux's voice was harsh but low. They could not risk being overheard. “It has to _be_ real. It has to be real enough to potentially fool...” The unspoken name hangs in the air. Hux deflated slightly. “He'd know. He'd know if you weren't dead, or dying. He knows how far one can be pushed.”  
Rey gave him a long look, the options, the possibilities running amok in her head. She knew where he was going. She understood that, objectively, it was the best option. Still, giving in without a fight would have felt like betrayal. Like the past weeks had not happened.  
“I can't let you... I won't allow it!”  
“Then don't. Be quick.” She could hear his broken smile. “Be fast enough to save me.”  
Rey swallowed her answer and changed the topic. There was no use exhausting him with this. 

__

I'm feeling sick,” Rey said, her face pale and the circles under her eyes almost black. The guard who had brought the food sneered at her wordlessly, so Rey doubled over and threw up across his feet. Not much. Just enough to bring her point across. She tumbled forwards, falling into the guard's arms.  
“Disgusting,” he muttered as he pushed her back into the cell and threw the door shut behind her. There probably wouldn't be any food for another day or two. It didn't matter. Rey wiped her hand over her mouth and kept her fingers closed around the small piece of metal she had ripped off the guard's uniform. Turning it into a blade would take hours of sharpening, but it would be worth it. It had to be. 

__–_ _

_It's happening today. Less than an hour._  
Leia's voice was an echo inside Rey's head, the strumming of a string she pretended didn't exist. Scraping the steel plate against the floor in a regular movement, Rey sent an impulse as an answer before closing herself off again.  
“Less than an hour,” she whispered, and beside her, Hux shivered. They sat in silence, hands barely touching. They had gone through the plan several times. They had said everything that needed to be said. All that was left to do was listen, and wait. 

The first impact was a shiver running through the ship. The second one was an explosion, followed by the scraping sound of durasteel falling apart.

Hux gave her a long glance. “Be ready.” His broken fingers curled around the makeshift blade through sheer willpower. He set it on the inside of his right arm and looked up at her, eyes clear for the first time in weeks. “May the Force be with you.” She didn't know how he knew the words. All she knew was that she didn't want to watch, but that she owed it to him.  
Hux cut his arms open as if to the matter born. He managed the right arm in one quick, straight slash from his wrist to the inside of his elbow, blood gushing out immediately. He didn't cry out. He went about the second half methodically, laid the blade into the blood-covered hand and pushed into his skin to the best of his abilities. A clean cut was impossible with that technique. Rather, he tore a hole into his arm between radius and ulna and then pressed the blade in the direction of his wrist, however far it would go. At some point, it lodged between the bones and he had to stop. A high-pitched wail escaped his throat. His pain was so intense that for a few moments, it bled into Rey.  
She pushed every connection between them shut.  
As neutral as she could, she watched him curl up, cry out, throw his useless arms around. Blood was splattering across the cell. Hux's movements quickly turned erratic, then slow, as if he was fighting through molasses. Then he laid still, just twitching.  
Rey drew a deep breath. She counted to three.  
She threw herself against the door and started screaming. 

"Please! Someone, anyone! He is dying!"

Her bones connected to the durasteel again and again, echoing through the whole ship. Someone had to do something about it. Someone had to react.  
It only took two minutes until the door slid open.

The first guard was sneering at her, ready to hurt her, somehow. Then he saw the blood.  
She watched his face flicker through several emotions, disgust, anger, before settling on fear. _Lord Ren_ , she caught as a half-thought, before he called backup.  
Hux was pulled out of the cell unceremoniously, with little care for his accumulation of wounds. Rey watched them closely, her muscles burning from restraint.  
She counted.  
_I'm sorry, Hux_ , she thought.  
Then she jumped. 

Nothing about her fighting was elegant. Nothing was pretty. It was all sharp elbows and teeth, tearing flesh from bone until she got her hands on his weapon. It turned cleaner after that, though not less violent. 

A picture went through her like an electric shock while she was trying to shoot a trooper. 

_His hair was long and dark, his face pale. She still knew the constellations of his freckles and moles, even after all these years. She knew the tilt of his head, the trembling of his smile. She knew, with absolute clearness, that this was not Ben. “Let go of him.” The shimmer in his eyes turned from gold to bright yellow. His smile revealed too many teeth. “But mother,” he said mockingly. “Do you not recognize your son?” Her hands flew to the lightsabre Luke had left behind. “I do recognize evil when I see it.” She spat it out and ignited the lightsabre. “And I do recognize a Sith when I see one.” Her heart was trying to beat out of her chest, yearning for something she knew wasn't real. Ben was dead. Ben had been dead for months. This was just his body, used in an attempt to taunt her._  
_“I'm almost sorry,” his voice kept mocking as the familiar red lightsabre lit up in his hand. “Ending the bloodline of Skywalker today. What a waste.”_  
_Leia didn't wait. Her body shot forwards, not trying with finesse but rather with directness. He had not anticipated that – her quickness, her brute force, her shield against his use of the Force. Three steps, and her lightsabre was cutting through his chest easily. He looked down, as if he couldn't quite believe that she had done it. Then his smile curled up one last time. “What a... waste,” right before he fell. Right before his arm swung up in a last movement and she was not quick enough to block it and..._

The bond was cut suddenly, leaving Rey reeling, leaving a tangle of emotions flooding her mind.  
She killed everyone in the corridor, fuelled by anger and pain and emotions bleeding into her that were not hers. When the last guard was nothing but a body, void of everything, she stood and breathed. A part of her, one that had not been awake in months, maybe years, uncurled.

She couldn't take it if even one more person she cared about died. She would go mad. She would lose herself.  
She looked at Hux's pale, unmoving face and said, softly but carrying all the power in the universe: “No.”  
She closed her eyes. Then she opened them. And then she opened them again.  
She saw the world. She saw the turn of the universe.  
Rey reached out. 

__–_ _

_Hux had thought he knew death. He had thought death was the unforgiving eternal blackness of his cell, that death would be as cold as his life had been._  
He had been wrong. Death was not dark. It was emptiness, pressing down on him, and he was emptiness, too. He was not cold. He was not in pain. He was not scared. He understood.  
Death was one thing, and one thing only. It was inevitable. It was the outcome. The culmination point of everything that had happened or would ever happen.  
He was calm. He was void.  
He was ready to let go. 

And then the emptiness cracked, and something was there. Just in his periphery, close enough to notice but too far to truly observe. But he felt the shift of the totality of the universe around him, shifted with it as he was pulled towards a new centre of gravity. Something was in the emptiness, and it was bigger than death.  
Bigger than life.  
It was something that could not be named. The pull was a _need_ , and the need crept into him. Filled him up.  
A need for him to be alive. A need for him to not be dead, at least. A song in his mind, older than time itself, that turned him back into something as it expelled the void. He was something, some _one_ , and therefore he could not be dead, the presence told the emptiness.  
And death receded. 

_And Armitage Hux drew a deep breath._

__–_ _

For a week, Hux was floating. He existed in a space somewhere between awareness and unconsciousness, hooked up on machines and covered in bandages. Two days Rey had allowed herself to sit and watch him, see the pulmonode she had helped build in a hurry expand much like a real lung, the faintest of glows under Hux's skin. Had come to terms with his missing parts, the ribs they had to remove. He was not dead, and only this was important to her. 

When the two days were over, Rey started planning.  
She did not bother with any chain of command. She could not, and would not, stay. She had bled so much for the Resistance. It was her right to leave them with the broken bits and have them put the world back together. It did not matter to her what they did with it. She was removed from their universe either way, after everything she had lost. For Finn she would have stayed. For Poe, Leia, Luke.  
Now, nothing held her back.  
She went to Kaydel ko Connix and told her that she would go, and that she would take Hux.  
Leia had taught her heiress well. Kaydel did not object. She only asked one question.  
“When will you return?”  
And Rey, whose connection to the physical world was just one tattered, frayed thread, just one broken man who used to be her greatest enemy, gave the only answer she knew was true in a flat voice.  
“Never.”  
Kaydel did not try to stop her when she left the room. 

__

They pulled Hux out of unconsciousness after a week. He was far from healed, but the Resistance did not waste their resources unnecessarily. Rey couldn't blame them. Hux was alive, which was what mattered.

Hux was alive, but he was not _there_. His eyes were unfocussed, his every movement had to be directed. He followed orders but he didn't speak.  
He got up when Rey told him to. He got dressed when she helped him, threading his useless arms through the sleeves. The limited bacta the Resistance had been able to spare for them had not even been close to enough to undo all the damage on his body. 

Rey did not worry about him. She did not allow herself to, not as long as she could feel his mind turning. Slow as an ancient, overused fulcrum, moving in circles of unanswered questions and always missing the point of understanding, but turning.  
Hux was not dead yet, and neither was she. So she planned, the only thing she had ever been truly good at. Collected what they would need to get them over the toughest of times: Food that would keep a while, spare clothes. The barest necessities. She had never owned much, she would not miss anything. As for Hux...  
She thought of his hollow eyes and protruding hips. Counted the scars on his shoulders from memory, because it was a habit, because it helped her calm down.  
He would have to adapt.  
Adapt and survive, as they had always done, in different ways. Any alternative did not bear thinking. 

__–_ _

Technically speaking, the place was his.  
Rey had plucked the location from his memories, a fantasy so old it was ingrained in the core of his being. Another life, had things turned out different. 

It was a shed on an Outer Rim planet with only a string of letters and numbers for a name.  
Big enough to house two, small enough to feel claustrophobic when the door slammed shut behind Rey. Like the walls were closing in. Like the darkness was back to suffocate her.  
Rey concentrated on her chores and pushed the fear away. She didn't have time for it. Other things needed doing, and soon. There were the missing floorboards that needed replacing, and Hux needed to be fed. The crooked back door needed to be put back in place, the wood of the table needed sanding, and Hux's wounds needed re-dressing. There was enough to do to get through the days. 

At night, she sat by Hux's bedside and watched the rise and fall of his chest. She watched the way the light of the moon fell across his face, cutting it in halves. How his hands were twitching over the thin blanket, and how the hard edge of his cheekbones was softened by stubble. Hux's mouth was a hard line, his eyelids flickering. 

He would wake up.  
She could not have him wake up.  
That was all she knew when she reached out with her mind and pressed down on his thoughts. It wasn't gentle, nor refined. But it worked. Carefully, she extinguished the memories, and Hux calmed down. And Rey settled into her position, limbs twisted so they did not touch him, and put her ear to his chest. 

Exhausted but with eyes wide open, she counted his heartbeats. 

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so this monster got out of control. But it is done now.  
> The song to go with this is Angus & Julia Stone - Draw Your Sword
> 
> Un-edited because I am so exhausted.


End file.
